Australia: Biological weapons

The Australian Department of Defence formed the New Weapons and Equipment
Development Committee soon after the end of WW2. Documents in the National
Archives, declassified in 1998, revealed the extent to which Australia
considered the development of biological weapons in the 1940s and 50s.

Secretary of the Department F.G. Sheddon sought the advice of leading
microbiologist Sir Frank Macfarlane Burnet in December 1946. Burnet was
Director of the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute for Medical Research, and
won the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1960. Sheddon asked whether Australia
had the capability to develop biological weapons that would work in tropical
Asia without spreading to Australia's more temperate population centres.

Burnet wrote a comprehensive memo to the Department of Defence in which he
said Australia should develop biological weapons that would work in tropical
Asia without spreading to Australia's more temperate population centres.

"Specifically to the Australian situation, the most effective
counter-offensive to threatened invasion by overpopulated Asiatic
countries would be directed towards the destruction by biological or
chemical means of tropical food crops and the dissemination of
infectious disease capable of spreading in tropical but not under
Australian conditions."

In a meeting with Sheddon in January 1947, Burnet argued that Australia's
temperate climate could give it a significant military advantage.

"The main contribution of local research so far as Australia is
concerned might be to study intensively the possibilities of biological
warfare in the tropics against troops and civil populations at a
relatively low level of hygiene and with correspondingly high resistance
to the common infectious diseases."

Burnet was invited to join the chemical and biological warfare subcommittee
of the New Weapons and Equipment Development Committee in September 1947.
The committee prepared a report, of which Burnet was the principal author,
entitled Note on War from a Biological Angle suggesting that biological
warfare could be a powerful weapon to help defend a sparsely populated
Australia. The report urged the government to encourage Australian
universities to research areas of biological science of relevance to
biological weapons.

"The main strategic use of biological warfare may well be to administer
the coup de grace to a virtually defeated enemy and compel surrender in
the same way that the atomic bomb served in 1945.
Its use has the tremendous advantage of not destroying the enemy's
industrial potential which can then be taken over intact.
Overt biological warfare might be used to enforce surrender by
psychological rather than direct destructive measures."
(Note on War from a Biological Angle)

The minute of a meeting in February 1948 note that Burnet "was of the
opinion that if Australia undertakes work in this field it should be on the
tropical offensive side rather than the defensive."

Burnet and a delegation of the chemical and biological warfare subcommittee
visited the UK in 1950 to examine British chemical and biological warfare
research. In a report of the visit Burnet concluded that "In a country of
low sanitation the introduction of an exotic intestinal pathogen, e.g. by
water contamination, might initiate widespread dissemination."

"Introduction of yellow fever into a country with appropriate mosquito
vectors might build up into a disabling epidemic before control measures
were established."

The subcommittee recommended that "the possibilities of an attack on the
food supplies of S-E Asia and Indonesia using B.W. agents should be
considered by a small study group".

It 1951 it recommended that "a panel reporting to the chemical and
biological warfare subcommittee should be authorised to report on the
offensive potentiality of biological agents likely to be effective against
the local food supplies of South-East Asia and Indonesia".

The activities of the chemical and biological warfare subcommittee were
scaled back soon after, as Prime Minister Robert Menzies was more interested
in trying to acquire nuclear weapons.

Australia signed the Biological Weapons Convention in 1972 and chairs the
Australia Group.